I forgot to mention something very important earlier when documenting the disappearance of 1 John 5:1 from the new edition of What Love is This? I passed by, improperly, the response that Hunt had initially offered. I recall a meeting in which Hunt claimed he had “replied” to my documentation of his error on 1 John 5:1. But a quick review of Debating Calvinism reveals what Dave thinks can qualify as a response. And since this will come up again when we look at his third attempt at trying to get around Acts 13:48, I wanted to mention it. First, Hunt tells us that “the verse could be taken either way” (p. 114). Later he says “I won’t object. The verse can be taken both ways….Nor do I need this verse, for there are many others that declare in language that cannot be reversed that faith precedes regeneration” (p. 211). Hunt says it can be taken “both ways,” but, he does not even try to substantiate this claim. If the grammatical and syntactical information provided is true, then it cannot be taken “either way.” If Hunt wishes to be taken seriously, he has to realize that you have to provide a counter-argument to substantiate such a claim, yet, he does not even try to do so. Note that Hunt does not mind attempting to make it look as if such passages are confusing or difficult to interpret (while all of his “dozens” or even “hundreds” of passages are, of course, so clear that he does not even have to bother with exegeting them!) all in the service of his human tradition! So his first argument it, “verse X which Calvinists use is confusing and capable of a different meaning.”
Argument number two is always the same. “This verse cannot mean what the Calvinist says because of this long list of verses over here…that I will not bother to exegete, but I’ll just list them anyway.” This argument is so repetitive in Hunt’s writings that it appears on almost every page. It came up in our radio discussion last week. While Hunt was often citing other sources, my presentations were almost all completely focused upon exegeting the key passages. In his response, Hunt claimed he “cited Scripture” far more often than I did. Well, if you think that providing lists of Bible references is the same as offering exegesis of the text, I guess that’s true. Later Hunt made the claim that I have a limited number of verses that I just repeat over and over again. Yet, when you offer exegesis and get such in-depth responses as, “Oh, well, I don’t need that verse anyway, I’ve got all these over here,” you can see why you have to keep going back over basic issues. If Hunt would even make an attempt to engage the text, we might be able to get somewhere, but that’s the one thing he avoids at all costs (including the cost involved with clearly, obviously avoiding the public debate challenge that he knows I have offered to him repeatedly). Now, of course, as I pointed out in DC, every time I invested some of my limited words to inspect some of his “lists” of verses, I demonstrated that his long lists of verses carry no weight. But all that resulted in was a new list of verses. Outside of live interaction in debate, you can keep dodging the issue that way forever.
